Samsung SH100 14Mp Wi-Fi compact camera

Call the shots from your smartphone

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The 230k dot touchscreen is hardly a selling point either. Resolution is average, contrast quite poor and the finish highly reflective, making framing in bright daylight difficult, if not impossible. For example, when photographing on the beach, with the sun directly hitting the screen, I was literally shooting blind.

The menu icons are in keeping with Samsung's Touchwiz phones

The SH100 offers three automatic shooting modes: Smart Auto, Scene and Program – and some scene specific mode such as Beauty Shot, Macro, Night and Object Highlight, a shooting mode that allows you to adjust depth of field directly on the screen. There is no manual or semi-manual option but the Program mode lets you be more creative by providing adjustable settings such as white balance, ISO, EV, face detection, focus options and metering modes.

In terms of video options the SH100 provides a Smart Movie mode – with little customisation choice other than selection of movie size – and a Movie mode, which also lets you adjust parameters such as metering, EV and white balance. For both still shooting and video capture the SH100 offers a range of artistic filters including Miniature; Vignetting; Soft Focus; Sketch; Fish-Eye; Classic; Retro and Defog. Creative filters and effects can be applied before or after capture through a series of specific applications like Photo Filter, Movie Filter and Palette Effect.

To highlight the fun nature of the camera Samsung has provided the SH100 with some amusing if slightly tacky features such as MagicFrame that lets you shoot images within a wild and well-designed range of frames. Effects can be quite startling with your face splashed in the middle of wall graffiti or on a massive billboard as you can see from the sample shots.

In terms of image quality don’t expect too much from the SH100. Colours are rich, metering is consistent and pictures are detailed enough but noise is a serious problem throughout the SH100’s otherwise extensive ISO range. The 5x optical zoom, doubled with a 2x digital option, sounds versatile on paper but proved less useful in practice, since producing sharp images at maximum focal length is virtually impossible without resting the camera on a flat surface or using a tripod, as the digital image stabilisation system doesn’t help that much.

Micro SD cards are used for storage, which is becoming more prevalent on Samsung compacts

The SH100 is quite slow in powering up and in between shots, but has a fairly speedy autofocus system. Annoyingly, the SH100 uses micro SD cards but battery life is very good and the camera charges quickly both through the charger or from a computer's USB port. While the photographic features of this camera are just what you’d expect from an average point-and-shoot model, it's the Wi-Fi and wireless applications are the real selling point here.